Worlds apart? Solidarity concepts and political orientations in social media

The Citizen Science project Worlds apart? Solidarity concepts and political orientations in social media (SOPO) is a complementary project to the FWF-project Solidarity in times of crisis - Socio-economic change and political orientations in Austria and Hungary (SOCRIS). The societal cleavages in Austria and in the EU are steadily increasing. This has become particularly obvious in the debates about the arrival of large numbers of refugees in Europe. Social media are said to exacerbate these divisions: People perceive information on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. as objective, but it is actually highly filtered. This leads to the development of so-called filter bubbles. They are sometimes seen as a threat to democracy as people tend to cut themselves off from discussion and information which challenges their attitudes and beliefs. In the Citizen Science project SOPO people from different societal and political milieus analyze their own Facebook bubbles by guiding and analyzing discussions with their Facebook friends on selected political issues such as Muslims, refugees or the war in Syria. Through this analysis different political orientations as well as the foundations and borders of different solidarity concepts come into research focus. The Citizen Science approach helps, first, to get access to, and to gain extensive insights in different filter bubbles and, second, to improve scientific interpretations. The citizen scientists, in turn, will benefit from the project as they gain insights in doing empirical research and develop a critical media reception.

Worlds apart? Solidarity concepts and political orientations in social media Growing tensions between nationalist and exclusivist concepts of solidarity on the one hand and inclusive and universal ones on the other reflect deepening societal cleavages in Austria and in the EU. This has become particularly obvious in the debates about the arrival of large numbers of refugees in Europe. It is widely assumed, that social media create so-called 'filter bubbles' and 'echo chambers' and thereby exacerbate divisions. The project examined different and opposing concepts of solidarity in Facebook debates on political issues. It focused on social media, first, as a way to get access to representations of, and expressions by, people from different societal and political milieus and, second, to understand how social media contribute to the formation and confirmation of separate and opposing political attitudes and concepts of solidarity. Therefore, SOPO explored what kind of solidarity concepts exist in (political) debates in different Facebook communities and how these concepts were constructed and negotiated within a certain group. As the different social media groups are difficult to access for researchers, the field was entered by including citizens as researchers of their own life-world. The Citizen Science approach enabled the project team to get access to different bubbles and helped to improve, based on citizen scientists' knowledge, the scientific interpretations. The citizen scientists, in turn, could benefit from the project as they gained insights in doing empirical research from data collection to data analysis and in developing a critical view on data and hence a reflexive media reception. The SOPO project showed that controversies raised in the Facebook debates mainly concerned different logics of inclusion in and exclusion from the solidary community, predominantly referring to nationality versus achievement or to achievement versus need. These controversies reflect different principles of justice geared to status, achievement, equality or need, implicitly underlying different solidarity concepts. However, the Facebook debates also revealed divergent ideas among people sharing the same solidarity concepts or basic justice principles. These controversies mainly concerned questions regarding the concrete application of these principles. For instance, participants fully agreed about the centrality of the principle of need, yet disagreed about the concrete amount and kind of support necessary to secure a humane life. In terms of ideology, the SOPO project covered both rather homogenous and quite heterogenous Facebook debates and revealed quite different reactions to controversial postings, ranging from the expression of partial approval or polite refutations to quite deprecative or polemic responses. Thus, the findings question the commonly assumed high importance of 'filter bubbles' for processes of ideological isolation and polarization, suggesting a more complex picture about the negotiation of political issues in Facebook debates.